Meaning
In New England, especially eastern Massachusetts and Greater Boston, carriage can mean the wheeled shopping cart provided by a grocery store or other large retailer for customers to carry purchases while shopping.
How it is used
The Dictionary of American Regional English records carriage, grocery carriage, and shopping carriage for the wheeled basket used by customers in supermarkets and other large stores. DARE describes the sense as formerly widespread but now chiefly Northeastern, especially eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut, and includes multiple Massachusetts/Boston Globe attestations. WBUR's current Greater Boston field guide independently glosses carriage as shopping cart.
Examples
- “Grab a carriage before we start shopping.”
- “The carriage return is at the end of the parking row.”
- “She pushed the carriage toward the checkout.”
Pronunciation
/ˈkærɪdʒ/ · KAIR-ij
Tone and register
Ordinary and practical where the regional sense is established. A speaker using carriage in a Boston-area grocery store may simply be naming the object, not performing a local identity.
Visitor guidance
Visitors mainly need to recognize carriage as New England grocery-store vocabulary. Shopping cart is universally clear in U.S. retail contexts and is the safer choice when the regional meaning may be unfamiliar. Do not assume every New England speaker prefers carriage, and do not confuse the physical retail object with an e-commerce shopping cart.
Cultural context
Carriage is useful evidence of how ordinary retail vocabulary can vary regionally without becoming novelty slang. DARE's historical record shows that the shopping-cart sense once appeared more widely in the United States but is now especially associated with the Northeast, including eastern Massachusetts. That history is different from claiming Boston invented the term or that one supermarket chain created it, neither of which Maperla asserts without stronger evidence.
Places represented
Open the reviewed place guide for each regional sense carried by this canonical entry.